Tokyo 2020

An official digital guide for the millions of visitors, athletes and press in Tokyo for the 2020 Olympics

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伝統と革新

Dentou to kakushin is a Japanese phrase that captures the idea of honoring the past while innovating the future.

Three years prior to the Tokyo 2020 Olympics opening, the Chief Technology Innovation Officer for the games sought to showcase how the latest in mobile and AI technologies could provide a positive user experience for everyone attending the Olympic games.

In 1964, Tokyo became the first Asian city to host the Olympics, and it was a historic opportunity for Japan to not only showcase how fast its economy and standing in the world had grown, but also that it had become a world leader in technology including the launch of the Shinkansen (bullet train), Tokyo Metropolitan Highway system, the first photo finish line, and the first global live TV telecast of Olympics via satellite.

The 2020 Olympics offered Japan another opportunity to reaffirm their position as a technology leader and major player on the world stage. It was clear the world expected a lot from Tokyo2020 and that is because they believed and knew that Japan could deliver on this vision. However, the increase of technology came with the added complexity of creating more touchpoints and ways to interact with the games than any prior Olympic event.

ROLE

Vision & Implementation

SCOPE

Conceptal Design, Visual Design, Editorial Content, Prototype Development

TARGET

Visitors from all over the world

25m+

Potential end user reach

9

months

DETAILS

Over the course of 9 months, I had the opportunity to partner closely with the CEO of Yext Japan to deliver a visionary mobile experience for the Tokyo Olympic committee. The prototype showcased how Yext's online knowledge platform could deliver a multi-lingual, highly-structured data graph that included venues, events, hotels, locations, businesses, emergency services and more. This data would then be used to power a mobile application to guide visitors, atheletes and members of the press around the Olympic events.

The first task was to create a conceptual knowledge graph data structure. Below is a diagram showing the data schema, contributing to Yext's expansion from location data services to multi-entity support that included events, products, people, etc.

Next, I leveraged my cultural and linguistic fluency in Japanese to research the historic 1964 Olympics in Tokyo.  These games had a significant impact in creating a marked shift towards the adoption of the minimalist design and typographical aesthetic. The legacy of Yusaku Kamekura's posters, pictograph iconography and design language for the 1964 games still lives on to this day.

In my designs, I strove to maintain a sense of cohesion with a nod to the past, while bringing the user experience into the future. The common themes of minimalism, sans serif type and meaningful use of colors help visitors with wayfinding and orientation in a digital world just as they had for signage, brochures and luggage tags 60 years ago.

From within the application, a user orients themself on a map to locate events, hotels, restaurants or local businesses. The user also searches Olympic events, views maps for sporting venues, learns details about atheletes, and monitors up-to-date medal counts. The interconnectedness of the data from the knowledge graph allows the user to seemlessly navigate information with ease. 

Another important goal for the application was to inspire visitors with the beauty of the host country and to discover destinations in Japan to explore. To hint at this, the opening screen of the application begins with a beautiful looping sequence of timelapse photography taken from various locations around the country. Additionally, there is a "Discover Japan" section that includes highlights of some of the best known destinations to visit including Mt. Fuji, Kyoto and Hiroshima. 

I also introduced an AI-powered chatbot called "Olympi-kun" that answered questions that a visitor may have about the games or about Japan and could point them to the related details within the app. As this project was underway in 2017-2018, this feature predated ChatGPT by 5 years so perhaps that aspiration was a bit ahead of its time! 

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